Create a World of Darkness

"Let's have some entertainment... and make the suffering worse."
"Yami no Game."

Break All the Rules

OOC PERMISSIONS

• Backtagging If we’re both still interested and there’s effort, will go forever to the end.


• Threadhopping If the thread doesn’t already allow it, PM both parties for an OK first.


• Fourthwalling Not really interested in that unless the meme already calls for it.


• Offensive Don’t really have any? Just be tactful and PM if something goes off.


• Kinks Here you go.

IC PERMISSIONS

• Touching He’ll be nonplussed about a simple touch. Continue and he’ll make it stop.


• Hugging If he knows you, you might get away with one. Strangers will get stabbed in the gut.


• Kissing Not if you don’t want your lips slashed off. You’ll have to be "with" him to do this.


• Flirting Normally, he's not interested, but if he's in a mood, he might return it. Disturbingly.


• Romancing Marik loves himself. End of story. He’s a psychopath, so this isn’t even a thing.


• Sexing Maybe, with prior CR and some IC interest, but it'll only ever be a physical relationship.


• Fighting Physically, he can hold his own. Supernaturally, maybe. Duelist, he’s killer.


• Injuring Simple injury is fine. PM if something’s going to get maim or scar worthy.


• Killing Well, he’s technically died once, so it can happen. PM first to ask about it.


• Mind Reading You can try, but he’s got ways of recognizing and blocking this. Plus returning it.


• Warning Yami Marik is NOT a safe guy to interact with. He’s a cruel, sadistic, twisted bastard who has manipulated, tortured, and murdered people, and he does it for fun. He also has a pretty traumatic backstory, so elements of child abuse, mutilation, and revenge will come up.

SHIPPING

• otp ✓✓✓ Yami Bakura.


• good ship ✓ Marik, Jounouchi, Kaiba, Yami Yugi.


• okay ship ✓/✗ Everyone else.


• bad ship ✗ Rishid (only because Yami Marik will murder him).


• notp ✗✗✗ Yami Marik should be a NOTP for everyone.

OTHER

• Introduction
• Appearance
• Personality
• Abilities
• Open Post
• Source

Burn Away to Ash

While Yami Marik is a Duelist and prominently has most of his abilities associated with the Duel Monsters card game, he does have some supernatural powers granted to him by his stats as a Tomb Keeper and as one of the chosen of the Millennium Items. In his case, that Item is the Millennium Rod. On his own, Marik is naturally very athletic and rather strong. Even as a child, his reflexes are fast enough to catch a whip striking at him and subsequently pull said whip from a grown man’s hand. He appears to have some skill at martial arts and thievery, able to catch his original self’s off guard and reverse their offensive positions while simultaneously stealing back the Millennium Rod in the same move.

Most of Marik’s supernatural powers come from the Millennium Rod, as he is one of the select few chosen to use the Millennium Items and the Egyptian God Cards. His Millennium Rod grants him the power to manipulate people’s minds, allowing him to turn people into slaves under his control and see and hear everything they do. He can also use the item to telepathically communicate with others, look into people’s memories, trick their minds into believing what he wants them to, and render people unconscious. Of even greater danger is the item’s power to allow Marik to leave portions of his mind in people he controlled once before, permitting him to regain control of them remotely at a later time, even if he is no longer in possession of the Millennium Rod.

Like the other Millennium Items, however, the Rod’s powers fail if Marik tries to use them on those who own or are connected to the other Millennium Items. Also, if the victim has an enormous force of will, the Rod’s mind control spell can be broken. Yami Marik can use the Rod to harness other abilities, such as telekinetic forces to attack or immobilize opponents, and lightning energy capable of destroying heavy guard robots and technological machinery strong enough to be used in fortresses. It can also produce a blinding light, like many of the Millennium Items, to incapacitating those around it.

Marik’s Millennium Rod grants him power over the Dark Games, which allow him to materialize and command Duel Monsters and their effects in a semi-physical state. He can also cast a Penalty Game against the loser, capable of inflicting different results and rules based on his will and imagination. Marik's games created through this item have been the most brutal and damaging shown in the series, as they revolve around physical, mental, and emotional torture until the victim is rendered too traumatized to fight back or passes out from the damage exertion. Among the effects of his games are memory destruction, pain inducement, and physical destruction as the body is consumed by darkness.

When he wins a Dark Game, Marik’s power over the darkness increases and the person who lost the game is placed within his power. When Mai lost to him in her game, Marik trapped her in a mental nightmare that would kill her in a day from the sheer strain, putting her physical body in a coma in the process. When Jounouchi lost to him in his game, Marik inflicted so much pain on his body, he left him in a comatose state requiring emergency equipment to help keep his lungs and heart going. Neither of these comas were “normal” in nature, so the medical doctors who treated them were unable to ascertain how or why the comas came about, much less how to wake either patient up. It wasn’t until Marik was weakened and killed respectively that Jounouchi and Mai were released from their torments.

Despite its delicate look, the Millennium Rod can be used as a physical weapon. A short blade spike is concealed in the bottom of the rod, with the rod’s shaft acting as the sheath. This knife was the very one used by the Ishtar clan to carve the Egyptian symbols on their firstborn male heir's back. Marik was one of the many to endure this painful ritual, performed on him against his will by his father, and he symbolically took his revenge by using the same knife to murder his father and carve the man’s back off. While not as sharp, the wing-like protrusions off the side of the Rod’s spherical head can be used as cutting weapons, as Marik swung it like an axe at one point to strike his opponent.

Yami Marik’s card deck is not a “weapon” per say, but it is an important part in his abilities. He runs an Immortality-Torture Deck, which focuses on slowly torturing his opponents and reveling in their suffering. In the theme of lasting pain, Yami Marik's cards slowly drain his opponent's strength and inflict despair on them as he picks them apart one piece at a time. Examples include discarding his opponent’s hand with "Helpoemer", lowering their monsters’ Attack with "Dark Jeroid" and "Plasma Eel", and inflicting Burn damage with "Coffin Seller", "Lava Golem", and "Bowganian".

Yami Marik also uses Slime cards to run his theme of immortality, making use of "Revival Slime", "Metal Reflect Slime", and "Slime Breeder Reactor" to create monsters that cannot be permanently destroyed without dire sacrifices on his opponent’s part. Other cards, like "Nightmare Wheel", "Viser Shock", and "Viser Des", are based on torture machines used to inflict pain and gruesome injuries while prolonging death. Marik's Deck otherwise relies on a variety of powerful Trap Cards and Fiend-Type monsters that are similarly themed with spikes, blades, and cuffs.

With "The Winged Dragon of Ra" as his trump card, Yami Marik uses a variety of cards to discard it, then revive it with "Monster Reborn" to devastate his opponents by burning their monsters to ash each time Ra is revived. He also can utilize Ra’s unique abilities for quick and powerful attacks that come at the cost of risking his Life Points, but can often result in an offense so overpowering, it because a devastating into a One-Turn Kill. He further relies on retrieving "Monster Reborn" to his hand after using it initially to continue to revive "Ra" again and again, using cards such as "Left Arm Offering" and "Mining for Magical Stones" to play the card in an out of his graveyard, ultimately leaving his opponent nothing but charred remains.

But I Love the Darkness

Yami Marik is the manifestation of Marik Ishtar's extreme hatred, anger, pain, and envy, created to handle the burden of suffering and vengeful desires the other boy could not. Because of this, Yami Marik is a person of pure cruelty, wickedness, and insanity who cares for no one but himself. He is extremely deceitful and treacherous to those around him, and lacks any form of empathy towards others, viewing everyone else as either pawns or prey to either be used until they’ve run their course or to be destroyed for getting in his way. While others in the canon have defined goals, Yami Marik’s goals are nebulous and insane, focusing almost solely on torture, murder, and destruction inflicted on anyone he can. As far as he’s concerned, the end results of his actions are the annihilation of everything on Earth but himself, plunging the world into shadows and suffering, and laughing over the remains in the dark.

A brutal and malicious psychopath, Yami Marik is highly sadistic, to the point that he incorporates this sadism into his dueling strategy. He builds his Deck around torture-themed cards and uses his dark powers to manifest them into reality so he can torture his opponents for his own pleasures. Many of his tortures are long-lasting, repeating their painful effects over the course of many turns, dragging out the torture and providing Marik with even more entertainment. He also shows traits of masochism, exemplified after his "Gil Garth" was destroyed and its pain was transferred to him, resulting in Marik laughed psychotically and stating that he was enjoying the feeling. During his last Duel, he blatantly stated that he got the most twisted pleasure from torturing Yami Yugi, the Pharaoh from millennium ago, whose tomb Marik’s tribe was to eternally guard.

While he shows great interest and knowledge in physical torments, Marik is even more skilled in emotionally torturing his opponents and manipulating them in order to gain an intense advantage. He quicky devises Dark Games that greatly exploit his opponent’s weaknesses and ties them to his games to undermine their abilities.
• For Mai, he created a game where when they lost Life Points, they lost memories, something that Marik didn’t care about, but which had a severe psychological effect on Mai.
• For Jounouchi, he created a game which connected the Duelists to their monsters so that they'd feel the pain their monsters did, then repeatedly tortured Jounouchi to the point of cardiac arrest.
• Finally, for Yami Yugi, Marik created a game where each Duelist’s “other” (the original Marik for Yami Marki and Yugi for Yami Yugi) would be painfully destroyed each time they lost Life Points, something that would ultimately kill both Yami Yugi and Yugi himself, while simultaneously ensuring the original Marik would die and Yami Marik would survive.

His deliberate setups of these games display a very keen mind behind his insanity, as he not only gave himself an advantage over his opponents, but also fed into his opponents’ thoughts and feelings in the future, furthering his ability to play on the emotions of others. However, this indulgence in his sadistic streak and manipulation means Marik has a habit of relying upon his dark powers when he Duels – particularly their role in winning his Duels, since he would have lost against both Mai and Jounouchi had they not succumbed to the distracting and torturous effects of his Dark Games.

Though certainly reliant to a degree on his shadow powers during a Duel, Yami Marik is by no means an incompetent Duelist. He often plans ahead of his opponent and attempts to trap them in inescapable loops to make them fall into despair. Just in in case Yami Yugi survived the attack of "Ra", Marik prepared his Egyptian God Slime to complete his strategy of immortality, then followed up with "Jam Defender" to make the immortal monster the only target Yugi could attack (thanks to its ability to regenerate). He also knew more about the abilities of "Ra" than the original Marik himself and he outwitted his alter ego and Yami Bakura by changing most of the cards in his Deck when forced into an impromptu Duel.

Beyond his sadistic enjoyments, Marik usually displays a very cool and confident demeanor when he’s not facing off against someone he’s directly targeting. However, much of his conversations are soaked in arrogance and confidence and Yami Marik isn’t any shyer about throwing threats under his words as he is blatantly voicing to kill someone. He possesses a very intimidating and vengeful presence, demonstrated clearly during his initial physical emergence from Marik’s psyche. Not only did he immediately stand up to his father’s whippings, disarming the man in the process, he brazenly claimed the Millennium Rod for himself in the presence of its owner, then proceeded to it to pin his father and sister against the wall. His calm approach towards Ishtar was frightening enough, it left the man screaming before Marik ruthlessly murdered his father in revenge. He keeps this same air around him, rarely showing anger or frustrations outside his cocky demeanor. The times he does slip, however, he recovers easily enough and carries on, practically immune to intimidation and fear unless he finds himself in a truly life-threatening situation.

In the Virtual World arc, Yami Marik is also shown to be quite headstrong, as he finally grows bored of waiting around for the others to return and leaves the ship to explore on his own, despite the risk of encountering security forces. When he does, he dispatches them easily enough. He also demonstrates a high degree of recklessness when he destroys a computer that was the only means of stopping a missile launch, his only reason being the destruction that it would cause. Despite the missile threatening to kill him along with everyone else in the digital fortress, he is subsequently seen greatly enjoying the frantic escape on the airship that followed. However, Yami Marik has some difficulty with advanced technology (his Duel Disk notwithstanding), as he had trouble with a security passcode constantly denying him access when he tried to open a door, which led to him ultimately destroying the door to gain access. This is somewhat understandable, as he comes from a part of the world that is not as technologically advanced.

Interestingly, Yami Marik has very little interest in Yami Yugi's or Seto Kaiba's pasts, something which his alter ego wanted to know, and considers the information unimportant to his goals. In addition, while Marik's goal of becoming the new Pharaoh was fueled by a personal enmity towards the Pharaoh particularly, Yami Marik only sees the goal of revenge against the Pharaoh as an added bonus to what he’s already wanting to do. As for his own goals, Marik lacks any truly defined aims, save for for having his own life in the real world and spreading pain and suffering in the world. He even states to Yami Yugi that the pain which was carved into his back would be returned to the world over and over, taking his revenge on the Pharaoh even further by filling the world with darkness and suffering, all for his own personal amusement.

Because of this, Yami Marik considers his original self to be “weak” and “useless” as a person, deriding his other as not “cruel enough” and only causing “a little trouble” while he’s in control. In his own words: "The other Malik is afraid of the dark. But me—me, I love Darkness so very much." With this attitude and ideal, Marik considers himself the "true" Marik, as he acts on the desires and wishes his other is too weak to even acknowledge. He furthers this distinction in that he largely does not consider himself part of the Ishtar family, referring to Ishizu and his father as Marik's rather than his, barring his first emergence where he killed Ishtar. He also explains the pain of Marik's past as if it were his own, though it is arguable if he actually experienced the events himself or if he was birthed after them. Marik actually laughs after recounting it, explaining the story as the trauma that dominates Marik.

That said, despite his cruelty and evil, Yami Marik places his self-preservation as a very high priority and values his own life dearly. He carries a strong hatred for Odion, whose presence was soothing for the original Marik and repressed his dark personality. Once free, Yami Marik made several attempts to murder Odion while he was unconscious, even threatening his sister Ishizu with death if she did not reveal where she had hidden their brother. As Odion’s waking would threaten to seal Yami Marik away again, the man became a direct hindrance to Yami Marik’s existence in the outside world. When facing his own death following his final match with Yami Yugi, Marik became desperate to survive and even sought to reason with the original Marik with a manipulative plea for his life to salvage his existence. Displaying none of his usual confidence, he instead banking on his other’s personal wishes for revenge and suggested they could rule the world together in his final moments. However, given his personality, this was merely Yami Marik trying to convince the original Marik to free him from his predicament.

This is my Better Half

Marik is a tall young man of Middle Eastern origin—specifically Egyptian descent—with dark brown skin, amethyst eyes, and white-gold hair (flaxen) blonde hair. At 16 years of age, he stands at 180 cm (5'11) and weighs in at 55 kg (121 lbs), with a slender, but surprisingly muscular and athletic body, which comes from his years training as a tomb guardian. His hair—in typical YGO fashion—is spiked upwards and explodes out in all directions via several large spikes. Marik also retains the same wing-like bangs of his progenitor’s, but his are far more spread out and claw-like in comparison.

Since he picked up the Millennium Rod, which he keeps in his belt while not carrying it, he bears the Eye of Wdjat on his forehead, which glows even when he’s not using his power. As far as body decorations go, Marik sports a pair of black tribal tattoos beneath his eyes that slice out from the corners and sharply cut a path to the middle of his cheekbones, vaguely outlining and accenting them. However, covering his back is a nigh-literal “slab” of detailed Egyptian symbols and language that were ritualistically carved into his skin with a burning knife.

Marik's usual outfit consists of a black sleeveless tank top, khaki combat trousers, a black belt, and black shoes. Owing to his tribe’s ancestry, he is heavily jeweled, wearing large golden earrings, three bands of golden neckwear, a golden armband around his biceps, and five golden bracelets on each arm starting from close to his elbows down to his wrists. Most memorably, he sports a massive purple cape, wrapped around his neck and spiked up at the shoulders. A golden chain decorates the neck folds of his cape, but serves little other visible purpose, and the rest is allowed to flow down behind him and spread at his sides in a strange physics-defying style. There is no suggestion in canon about such a cape being brought abord the ship, and no one questions Marik’s sudden arrival in it, making the whereabouts of his new clothes a trivial mystery. Finally, like many of the other Duelists in the series, he wears a KaibaCorp Duel Disk on his left arm.

As he is merely a split personality of the normal Marik, unlike Yami Yugi and Yami Bakura, who are both entirely different entities from their associated hosts in their own right, Yami Marik shares his progenitor’s body, save for adding some extra muscle. While his facial structure looks almost identical to his true self, he appears to be far more manic with his expressions and incorporates a wide range of them during his appearance.

At random times, faint ghastly images of his face stretch out from his head, unclear as to whether they’re illusions or mental projections. As his emotions grow more intense, Marik begins to strain his muscles to the point that his veins slowly start to appear on his face, giving the impression that they’re popping out of his skin. He’s well known for his disturbing and grotesque facial exaggerations as his stress and delight get the better of him, resulting in his eyes bulging wide open, his irises contracting into focused pinpoints, his mouth stretching into gleeful visages, and a recurrent habit of sliding his tongue out in serpentine movements.

The Winged Dragon of Ra

"The other Malik is afraid of the dark. But me— Me, I love Darkness so very much."

Yami Marik, also known as Dark Marik in the Japanese manga/anime, or just “Marik” by the rest of the cast, is Marik Ishtar's second personality created by his inner hatred and pain. He serves as the main antagonist of the Battle City Finals arc of the Yu-Gi-Oh! series, after he takes possession of Marik's body. Unlike Yami Yugi and Yami Bakura, Yami Marik did not originate as an entity sealed within a Millennium Item, but instead was spawned from the trauma Marik endured after being horrifically mutilated by his own father and sentenced to guard the pharaoh's tomb for the rest of his life. Thus, he is not dependent on a Millennium item to exist, but instead depends on Marik’s body to serve as his own. Sadistic, murderous, cruel, and vengeful, Marik’s seeks to destroy his other half and permanently possess Marik’s body as his own. He lacks any other goals asides from taking revenge on the Pharaoh who caused his torture and spreading pain and destruction across the world for his own sadistic amusement. Immoral, manipulative, and utterly selfish, Marik is a disturbed character who derives pleasure from committing acts of torture and destruction, and has no problem brainwashing and murdering people if it will amuse him and further his goals. NOTE: Marik is played from the original Japanese anime (which unfortunately includes some episodes bearing the classic and infamous 90’s bootleg subtitles), with supplements of the manga thrown in. So there’s no 4kids dubbed censorship and Shadow Realm stuff in his background or story. I’m still perfectly happy to play off other Yu-Gi-Oh! muses from the dub; just be aware that I’ll have zero familiarity with any dub-specific references.

YAMI MARIK • APPEARANCE PERSONALITY ABILITIES PERMISSIONS OPEN POST